Most college students have social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at their fingertips. Offering multiple avenues of communication, they have become a popular staple of the current generation. But that popularity comes with serious risks for privacy.
Over the weekend, an unknown hacker leaked nude pictures of over 100 celebrities on a content sharing website named 4chan.
Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence is among those celebrities. According to a thread posted on the website’s message board, the hacker may have 60 nude photos of Lawrence as well as others including Rihanna, Ariana Grande and Kirsten Dunst, to name a few.
According to an article written in USA Today, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said “the company is investing to be sure that iCloud accounts were not compromised.” iCloud is a storage service Apple provides to their customers as a way to back up photos and videos.
A debate has arisen over the ethics of viewing nude pictures that were not intended for public use. Many believe that since the nude photos made their way to the Internet, they are fair game to view. However, others think that privacy should be respected – no matter the level of fame of the person in the photograph.
“Your phone is personal property. Breaking into it is like someone breaking into your house,” 21-year-old Psychology major Anthony Williams said.
“Sexting” is defined as the act of sending sexually explicit materials by text message. Twenty percent of teenagers admit to having texted naked or semi-nude photos of themselves or posting them online, according to a study on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website.
The lines between what exactly is public and private have been blurred by the digital age. Websites such as myex.com allow users to post nude photos of their ex-significant others for anyone with Internet access to view. Furthermore, the 2014 romantic comedy “Sex Tape,” starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, depicts a situation similar to the leaked photo scandal. When married couple jay (Segel) and Annie (Diaz) try to spice up their sex life by filming a sex tape, it goes viral and is shared with family and friends through a series of unfortunate events involving the family’s iCloud account.
Christie Tran, an 18-year-old freshman Biology major, doesn’t see the allure of sending naked pictures to someone.
“Sexting is dumb anyways. I have a Snapchat account but I only use it to send funny pictures to my friends,” Tran said.
While Snapchat allows users to send photos to one another, they can’t be saved and disappear after a certain amount of seconds. However, many smart phones have screen-capturing capabilities that allow users to save the unsavable images to their phone’s photo gallery. In many cases, the images are captured without the sender’s knowledge or approval.
With photos and videos being stored in one location, it is growing more and more difficult for many users to keep their personal information and content private.
According to Carrie Brown, a former assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis and current director of the proposed social media journalism program at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, people have to do everything they can to protect themselves on the internet while also contributed to the positives that social media has to offer.
“These days, it is difficult to protect yourself 100 percent,” Brown said. “The thing is, people get so worried about the bad of social media, but there are good things that can happen as well. So, there’s a fine line. The young need to be careful. But at the same time, don’t be so afraid.”
